by Jeff Strand
“No blood, no foul,” Chrome Dome said. “But don’t try anything funny. We go for arms and legs only. And if you spill any of these I get a free shot and vice versa.” He swept his arm at the drinking containers bordering the patio. Clay gathered the “free shot” wasn’t for refreshment.
“Not having second thoughts, are you?”
“Well—”
“Get us those sticks,” Chrome Dome shouted. Taking his pair, Clay weighed them in each hand as if awestruck by their virility, dildos of impossibly manly proportion.
Chrome Dome flashed gap teeth again. “Ding-ding.” Backing into a corner, he stared Clay down while a crony removed his Elvis sunglasses. Clay glanced at the eager-eyed behemoths crowding around the patio. He wondered how many men waylaid by Chrome Dome had had second thoughts and still wound up in Mop-head’s pickup truck.
The kid threw down a fist and lost a third time to Rufio’s paper. Mop-head cursed and stepped between the two fighters. He removed his lifting belt and raised it like a start flag. “Begin.”
Twice, circling the ring, Clay flinched in anticipation. But he redeemed himself sidestepping a wild swing and tapped Chrome Dome’s log-like upper arm. The big man retaliated with a backhanded strike that should have caved in Clay’s skull. But Clay dodged the stick and smashed his against Chrome Dome’s nose, spraying both men with blood.
“Carrey’s a ringer,” someone said.
Gurgling a war cry, Chrome Dome raised his stick, but the smaller man hooked around behind him.
Knifing his stick between Chrome Dome’s legs, Clay ended the fight.
Chrome Dome fell on his face, convulsing around his sudden vasectomy. A hollowed-out, miniature watermelon filled with red liquid skidded onto the grass as his size-11 Adidas kicked out.
A phantom, a flicker of temperature behind Clay as someone charged in. He took Rufio out with a liver shot, then wheeled amongst the onrushing bodybuilders. Sticks arcing in the sunlight, Clay taught Chrome Dome’s crew that pain hurt immensely. Mop-head fell last, beaten by wood instead of paper. When he was done, Clay drank in the sight of weakness leaving bodies, the suits of living armor now scattered and broken around the yard.
As the groaning men fell silent, other sounds arose. Birds chirping, dogs barking, children laughing down the street. Clay was always amazed at how tender the world could be in the aftermath of violence. He despised men like Chrome Dome who profaned life’s sanctity, forced their will down the world’s throat like some orally obsessed rapist. For their viciousness surpassing all other animals, he felt they should be raped. Yet Clay couldn’t perform that function—his sex organs weren’t wired into his will to break King Shits.
Instead, he found other methods of punishment.
Clay dropped one of his sticks and rolled Chrome Dome on his back. Then he took the hollowed-out, miniature watermelon from the grass and cupped it to the injured man’s drooling, gap-toothed orifice. Red margarita dregs spluttered from under the cup and mixed with crimsoned vomit. Holding the cup in place, Clay drove the other stick through the rind, impaling Chrome Dome’s soft palate with blood-soaked rattan. He stopped when he had punched through the first cervical vertebra.
“My free shot,” he said, and departed.
2
A mile or so from Chrome Dome’s bungalow, Clay stopped at a restaurant. He entered through the bar side and ducked into the restroom. He cleansed his face and hands. Then he waited. Moments later his bowels seized and he slammed the toilet seat back. Brownish, chunky liquid shot from his mouth and filled the bowl. He flushed and returned to the sink. He was lucky. Once he pulled off the highway and barely clambered over the passenger seat to splatter the roadside. The last shadow jobs, he puked afterward even though he didn’t eat much. It was as if conscience struck through his digestion, rejected his vigilantism through his gorge.
What puzzled him was that it tasted earthy, like mud. Clay washed up again and frowned in the mirror. He sat at a booth in the restaurant.
Since his Rebirth, he needed little food. But he still enjoyed the ritual, sitting down to a meal and “playing” at eating. Ensconced among objects dedicated to a single task. The plastic menu stand, votive candle and salt and pepper shakers on his table were like the knobs, gauges and caution stickers inside his truck—a microcosm where chaos didn’t reach. As a young man he became a trucker to escape the world’s noise, tumult and disorder.
While he nibbled burnt toast and watched pigeons out the window, Clay forgot his gut problems and his war against King Shits. Then voices rose behind him.
“Yo cunt, I’m talkin’ to you.”
“Shhh, T, she’ll hear you.”
He barely noticed them when he came in. The restaurant’s only other patrons, two booths behind him. Talking about the waitress, the Kim Kardashian lookalike arranging silverware by the bar. The man was black and the blonde white woman wore short-shorts. A second woman at the table muttered something inaudible.
Then: WHAAAP cracked a fist on the tabletop. “I said, hey, BITCH, I’m TALKIN’ to you.”
The first woman said: “For God’s sake, T, I’ll get us some napkins. Just leave her alone, will you?”
“Fuck off, Iris. Sitcher ass down ‘fore I smack you into next week.”
Iris sighed.
Clay laid his butter knife next to the toast. He pitied Iris and the other woman. And he pitied the waitress. No wage was worth dealing with venomous shitheels like T. She deserved Employee of the Month for the way she endured his goading. Clay admired her swelling backside as she bent over utensils, moving so minutely she looked like her celebrity twin’s wax double. Maybe she’d found the best way to handle men like T was to freeze like a squirrel before a large dog.
“The ho hears me,” T said. “Right, ho? You hear me. Been hearin’ me for the last five minutes and actin’ like you Helen Mirren.”
“I think you mean Helen Keller,” Iris said.
“Whatever. Bitch better serve us.”
“I think I’ve got some toilet paper in my purse,” the second woman said.
“The hell for? Jesus, Betsy. Aiight. If that bitch don’t come in ten seconds I’m goin’ over dere and give her some a’ big T.”
Betsy said, “Actually, I’ve got tissues too.”
“Ten—”
“T,” Iris said.
“Nine—”
“Who wants some tissues?”
“Eight—”
“I promise they’re not used.”
“Seven—”
“T, please …”
“That was a joke. Come on, T, just take my—”
WHAAAP! cracked the fist again, this time on bone.
“Damn it, T!” Iris.
“Not a peep from you tricks. You wanted to use them tissues, girl, use ‘em.”
Betsy sobbed.
“Oh, NOW I got your attention,” T shouted at the waitress. “Don’t look at me like that, you deaf-actin’ bitch. You stay right where you are. You just keep playin’ with that silverware while I tear dat fat ass up.”
Clay got up and marched toward the table. T, on his feet, wiped his knuckles on his jeans leg and scowled. “The fuck you want, you Jim Carrey-looking motherfucker?”
He was Clay’s height, but beefier. Wearing a sleeveless tee-shirt. A lifetime of urban desolation and rage exuded through his pores. Clay had read about pimps: Confused, desperate young girls fell for their promises of protection and prosperity and wound up drug-addicted, sexually battered and often pregnant from their coercions.
Iris, the blond, turned in her seat and gaped up at Clay as if he’d punched in the code for a nuclear missile launch.
T was out of the booth and swinging when Clay stepped inside and drove his fist in T’s sternum. T’s legs meant to wheel him back ten feet but the wall absorbed the impact and he slid to a sitting position on the floor. Iris yelped when Clay pushed her gently back to her seat. “But he can’t breathe,” she said. Guppy-eyed, T sucked at air as if fellating
an under-endowed john.
The waitress said, “Holy shit,” as Clay bent T over the table. He twisted the pimp’s arm back and nodded at the puffy-eyed Latina between Iris and the wall. “Cover your eyes.” From the plate of chicken fried steak under T’s belly, he extracted a steak knife slathered in sausage gravy. He drove it into the base of T’s neck, paralyzing him.
Iris shrieked. The waitress shrieked. Betsy shrieked, peeking through her fingers at T’s blood leaking onto her French fries. Without use of his legs, the pimp was like a 200-pound dead fish.
“Napkins,” Clay snapped. The waitress quieted down and did as told. Clay tore a hole in the napkins pushing them down the knife in T’s neck.
“Here’s your damn napkins. Have a nice day.”
Iris gaped. Betsy shrieked again.
Clay left a hefty tip.
3
The town was called Wanting. Population 94, a gas station, a general store. Nearest post office was twenty miles north, in Dayton. The Hallers and family dog lived in the old Wanting fire station. Mr. Haller, fresh from the military, worked in Dayton and dropped Clay at Dayton Elementary each morning.
This was Clay’s first year there. Seventh grade. One day at recess, Chris Kezzlewick, an eighth-grader and the biggest kid in school, challenged Clay to a fight. When he refused, Chris made to tackle him and slipped. The nimble new kid dodged him all around the playground until a teacher stepped in. How he finally caught Clay came a week later, after school.
It happened on the forest road that led to the bus stop. Backed by buddies David and Quinton, Chris jumped Clay and dragged him into the forest. David and Quinton braced him against a tree in crucifix position while Chris pummeled him. A low blow dropped Clay to his knees. The sight of him kneeling, wet with tears, inspired the bully to relieve himself. Clay gagged on blood and Chris’s copious piss, still in his captors’ clutches, in Christ pose.
Dusk in those woods, pencil beams of sunlight stabbing through the murk of old growth. Next they turned Clay toward the tree and laid him face down. Dirt and pine needles sandpapered his cheek. “I said hold him!” Chris barked, behind him. Quinton’s hand clamped down on Clay’s wrist. The other boy, David, grabbed the other. “Don’t move, Clay,” he whispered, and it sounded like advice, like how Clay’s father advised him where to place his thumb when he drove a hammer. “Hic,” Quinton said, Quinton who always had hiccups because he ate like a famished dog, “hic.”
Clay heard Chris unbuckle his overall suspenders. He was like some fat snake crawling over Clay now, breathing hotly. His hands found Clay’s fly, pulled pants down, underwear next, cold earth kissing his shriveled penis and indrawn testicles. Time stretched Clay on a rack of pain and humiliation. Then finally the nerve ends in his broken boyhood granted him mercy and he passed out.
He didn’t tell his parents what had been done to him. Only that three classmates had beat him. His torment snowballed over the next few weeks when Chris Kezzlewick spread a rumor in school that Clay was a “homo.” Even teachers looked at Clay like some sort of pervert.
How hateful some of the boys called him names, Clay wondered if they, too, had been taken to those woods.
He grew so despondent that finally his parents moved from Wanting, population 94, to Los Angeles, population two-million-something. The Hallers took an apartment in a neighborhood where white, undersized, timid boys were singled out on the street. After so many Band-Aids and ice packs, Clay’s dad enrolled him in a Kung Fu school in the building where he worked.
“You won’t like it here,” the pudgy Chinese man warned Clay. “Children want action—” he whirled around and snapped a side kick over Clay’s head—“big movement.”
“All I want is to be left alone.”
“Then I’ll show you how, but you must honor the teachings.”
A year later, Clay stopped coming home bruised and bloodied.
From then on he avoided conflict. He treated others with kindness, compassion and restraint. As his skills developed so did his ability to find peaceable solutions. Trucking seemed a natural entry into the real world, a life of solitude and purpose. Sealed in the bubble of his semi, he reduced his chance of running into Chris Kezzlewicks and street toughs. Of course, he could never completely avoid bullies.
He was between shifts at a bar in Butte, Montana. Rowdy place. Friday night. A big man, like Chrome Dome but more fat than muscle, bumped Clay in passing. He turned on Clay and shoved him off his barstool. Clay reseated himself. Felt Big Man watch him. Didn’t see Big Man’s friend come up from behind and crack a glass stein on his noggin. Next thing he knew, two Big Men had him on the floor, working him over with steel-toed boots.
Visions of Chris Kezzlewick and his buddies flashed through his nerves. Chris pushing inside him, becoming part of him. Hic. Hic. Something in the brutal touch of his attackers awakened memories buried in his cells. Flipped a switch. Pain sloughed off Clay like old skin, and the kicks to his skull and rib cage, the commotion around him, passed through him like light through water.
Training took over. He rolled to his feet. Jabbed his fingers in each man’s throat. Slipped outside them, gave one a liver shot and the other a knee breaker. Dragged them by the wrists out the front door. Training turned into something other than self-defense. Clay pierced eyeballs. Broke fingers. Stomped scrotums. As the men screamed, he no longer saw pain as an end to conflict but as the beginning of a conversation. A lesson in how much can be broken if he plowed the body deeply enough.
Brutalizing those men, Clay felt nothing. No rage or hate. He followed a script in his muscles, the way a predator takes down its prey. Witnesses gaped when, with an air of punctuality, he urinated on his victims. Even then he felt no pleasure, no satisfaction beyond a job well done, like delivering a load to his next receiver. Pain and humiliation, right on time.
“You’re a monster!” Someone shouted.
Clay got the hell out of Butte, Montana.
Next night, walking down quiet back streets, he followed his shadow. And he realized he felt no rage or hate because he was those things, a negative incarnation of the principles he had lived by. Clay Haller died under a rain of steel-toed boots. His body now was like the shadow at his feet. A resurrection, a Rebirth of opposites. Like the men he had beaten, shadows of power driven by fear and weakness. The world, nothing but shadows.
Time to stop running from them.
Realizing that, Clay shed biological imperatives like food and sleep. One night he watched a TV show about a golem. A magical entity formed from clay, like his name, unstoppable pursuing the mission it was made for. He’d never heard of such a thing, but here he was, like that golem, a monster created from pain and humiliation to give the self-crowned kings of the earth—King Shits—a taste of their own medicine.
But how would he find them?
How could he reach so many?
Then he realized the answer was parked right outside his motel room.
4
Surfing the Internet on his laptop, Clay came across an item on cop killer Clint “Herc” Walker. Herc was well over six feet and resembled his granite-jawed, movie-actor namesake, at least in the mug shot. He was a hard drinker with a vicious temper. One night a deputy called on him, responding to a disturbance call. Heated by drink and bad poker hands, Herc bludgeoned the lawman with a bronze sculpture.
Paroled after 25 years in prison, Herc was back in his hometown, the article said. Grimsbo, population 1,100, on the way to Clay’s next pickup.
A temper like that, Herc might need talking to.
The temperature was in the nineties when Clay rolled into Grimsbo the next day. He checked into a motel. After weeks of napping in his truck, a private bed called to him. Curtains closed, A/C whirring, crisp sheets beneath him. Normally he didn’t need but an hour of rest, but the bodybuilders and T had drained him. Drifting off, last thing he saw was Chrome Dome’s gold Elvis sunglasses and gap teeth. Come on, Jim Carrey.
Next thing he knew he was
sitting up straight throwing punches in the dark. He kept on going till he realized he was hitting air. Shadow boxing.
“Clay!” The voice so close, like Chris Kezzlewick at his neck while he ran the shower. Dripping wet, Clay shot into the bedroom, found no one.
He peered through a gap in the curtain: Dusk out. He got dressed. Stared at himself in the bathroom’s cracked mirror. He threw back the toilet seat, puked mud and conscience.
“Clay!” Calling him from the door of the town watering hole.
Where he thought he might find Herc, or get a lead on him. The sort of place where peanut shells littered the floor and deer heads lined the walls. Business was good. Clay sat near some old-timers and scanned the bar’s patrons. Was someone stalking him, or was he getting twitchy after so long at war?
“Smashed a bottle on a guy’s throat, Herc did,” an old-timer said, wiping beer froth off his mustache.
Minutes later the legend himself walked in. He reminded Clay of rock stars who hadn’t seen the limelight in decades, a jarring contrast to yesterday’s portrait. Herc looked old, stooped and milk-pale, with wispy white hair and pinkish eyes. “Kidney cancer,” a Stetsoned old-timer said. Only his height and granite jaw identified him as the hard-drinking juggernaut who beat a peace officer to death twenty-five years ago.
Grimsbo’s drinkers, they patted him on the back and made way for him. Herc smiled through the welcome reception, eyes downcast, edging through the crowd. He nodded at Clay, the small-town courtesy, as he brushed past and joined a frumpy redhead sitting in back. A waitress served him ice water.
While this went on the old-timers talked about how Herc became an ordained minister in prison. Clay was about to leave when Herc’s spitting image—from the mug shot—lumbered through the door.
“Even worse than his old man, back when,” the mustached old-timer said.
